The 13 Movies Worth the Haul to the Multiplex in September

The summer movie season is slowly fading away, to be replaced by another fall marked by prestige pictures believed by the studios to be the cream of their crop. While September is still a tad early for such wannabe awards contenders, new efforts by Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Peter Berg, and Andrea Arnold will all try to make their case with critics, while potential crowd-pleasures Blair Witch, The Magnificent Seven, and Masterminds will aim for the mainstream crowd. And who can complain about a month that features a new Creed-esque film from the Mussels From Brussels? Here are your best bets for the coming weeks.

Morgan (Sept. 2)

Producer Ridley Scott teams with his son, director Luke Scott, for this Alien-esque tale featuring Kate Mara and Paul Giamatti about a humanoid creature created by scientists who decides to rebel against her captors and scientific-laboratory imprisonment.

Kickboxer: Vengeance (Sept. 2)

Jean-Claude Van Damme assumes the role of the mentor tasked with training a young man (Alain Moussi) to become a Thai kickboxing champion—all so that he might gain revenge against the brute (Dave Batista) who killed his brother—in this Creed-style reboot of the star's 1989 beat-'em-up classic.

Sully (Sept. 9)

Clint Eastwood directs this true story about Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger (here played by a gray-haired Tom Hanks) who successfully piloted a US Airways airplane into the Hudson River after it suffered a catastrophic malfunction.

Author: The JT Leroy Story (Sept. 9)

Laura Albert, the woman who wrote books under the pseudonym "JT Leroy"—a supposed HIV-positive ex-prostitute transgender man—gives her side of her eye-opening story in this documentary from Jeff Feuerzeig.

Blair Witch (Sept. 16)

Adam Wingard (You're Next, The Guest) sends a group of campers back into Maryland's Black Hills woods for this follow-up to the seminal 1999 found-footage horror film, which this time concerns the search for the original movie's still-missing characters.

Snowden (Sept. 16)

Not for the first time, Oliver Stone aims to generate political controversy with this thriller-esque drama about NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who will (on the basis of its trailers) be envisioned as a courageous super-genius fighting back against Big Brother, and will be embodied by Joseph Gordon-Levitt with a distinctly funny accent.

The Magnificent Seven (Sept. 23)

Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt, and Ethan Hawke will saddle up alongside some other misfit cowboys for Antoine Fuqua's (Training Day) remake of the 1960 Western (itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai) about a group of gunslingers hired to protect a town from bandits.

Goat (Sept. 23)

Andrew Neel and David Gordon Green's harrowing indie shines a spotlight on the horrors of college fraternity hazing via a fictional story co-starring Nick Jonas as one of many Greek brothers engaged in initiation-ritual mayhem.

My Blind Brother (Sept. 23)

A man (Nick Kroll) competes with his excessively capable blind brother (Adam Scott)—who, beneath his superstar exterior, is a jerk—to woo a woman (Jenny Slate) in this absurd comedy from director Sophie Goodhart.

Deepwater Horizon (Sept. 30)

The first of two year-end based-on-real-events dramas from Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg (the other being December's Patriot's Day, about the Boston Marathon bombing), this film—co-starring Kurt Russell, John Malkovich, and Kate Hudson—concerns the men and women forced to contend with the 2010 oil-rig explosion that resulted in the worst spill in U.S. history.

The Blackcoat's Daughter (Sept. 30)

Two young women (Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka, Lucy Boynton) find themselves confronting unholy supernatural phenomenon while stuck at their boarding school during winter vacation break—all while a third woman (Emma Roberts) slowly makes her way toward the school—in this mesmerizing, menacing horror film from director Oz Perkins (the son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins).

American Honey (Sept. 30)

Acclaimed at this year's Cannes Film Festival, this dreamy road-trip saga stars Sasha Lane as a young woman who joins up with a group of magazine-selling nomads (including Shia LaBeouf) as they wind (and party) their way through the country's heartland.

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